IARC is under attack from industry

IARC says industry is on a drive to disparage its findings as fake news amid uncertainty about crucial US funding

EXCERPT: A perfect storm is brewing. On Thursday, Trump unveiled a FY2018 budget that would chop $6 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). IARC’s work classifying things like bacon, plutonium and wood dust as carcinogens relies most heavily on NIH funding.
—

Bad news for the bad-news agency

By Natalie Huet
Politico, 17 March 2017
http://www.politico.eu/article/trump-international-agency-for-research-on-cancer-christopher-wild/

* Global cancer research agency says industry is on a drive to disparage its findings as fake news amid uncertainty about crucial US funding

As President Donald Trump raises the axe on U.S. medical research funding, scientists across the Atlantic are trembling, too.

The World Health Organization’s cancer agency, the France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has long been a prime purveyor of bad news. Now, with big business blasting it as fake news and Republicans in total control, U.S. funding crucial for IARC’s work is under threat.

A perfect storm is brewing. On Thursday, Trump unveiled a FY2018 budget that would chop $6 billion, or nearly 20 percent, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). IARC’s work classifying things like bacon, plutonium and wood dust as carcinogens relies most heavily on NIH funding. The chemical lobby recently launched a campaign portraying IARC as a useless scaremonger that ignores actual human exposure to potential hazards, and U.S. lawmakers are already investigating whether taxpayers’ money should be funding its work.

The industry’s attacks on IARC’s science pose a “real risk”, said the agency’s director, Christopher Wild, in an interview. “It plays into that populist view of experts telling us that everything is bad for us, and therefore let’s ignore all that information.”

IARC has been under fire from all sides ever since it classified the main ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup as a probable cause of cancer, two years ago. The finding put it at odds with a growing list of EU regulators. Both the food safety agency and, as of Wednesday, the chemicals regulators have deemed glyphosate safe, fueling an ongoing political drama over whether to keep the herbicide on the market.

Wild said he worries about the agency’s funding, is constantly looking to diversify its sources, and plans to ask its 25 member countries to consider chipping in more during the next annual meeting in May. The relentless criticism these days reminds him of attacks from the tobacco industry in the early 2000s, when IARC categorized second-hand smoking as a cause of cancer.

“Since that time, this is probably the most aggressive that it’s been. What we see is, it’s linked to classifications where there’s a very strong commercial interest,” Wild said.

He defended his agency’s reputation for strong and independent science, including for its classifications of carcinogens, known as monographs. This activity represents only a fraction of IARC’s work, but it has drawn the most attention.

In recent months, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Republican Jason Chaffetz, has questioned the NIH over its grants to IARC’s work on carcinogens. These grants have been running since 1994 and now amount to around $925,000 per year, according to NIH and IARC data. In a letter dated November 7 (the day before the U.S. presidential election, when Barack Obama was still in office), the NIH assured Wild of its support, saying the program was “highly regarded … for its systematic, rigorous, comprehensive reviews”.

But whether NIH’s funding — currently slated to run out in August — will continue to be renewed year after year as planned until 2020 is anyone’s guess. Wild said he had no assurances at the moment that the funding would continue, and no indication either that it would stop.

Right now, that money represents half of the carcinogens program’s total budget; the rest comes from mandatory contributions from member countries. That makes it the part of IARC that relies the most on U.S. funding. Out of the agency’s total expenditure of roughly $30 million per year, around two-thirds are funded by assessed contributions.

Wild said IARC had no plans to ditch or amend the carcinogens program. “We always ask ourselves: Is our scientific methodology the best available, and do we need to make any changes? At the moment we think we’ve got an extremely strong program,” he said.

Based in the French city of Lyon — famed for its (cancer-causing, per IARC) saucisson – the agency’s work as a whole includes training researchers, compiling authoritative statistics on the burden of cancer worldwide and classifying agents likely to cause the disease. There’s a catch to this last part, however. IARC assesses whether substances can cause cancer based on the scientific evidence of such a link, but doesn’t peg this risk on a specific level of human exposure, which can vary widely depending on countries, classes and occupations.

In other words, it classifies an agent as carcinogenic based on the strength of the evidence demonstrating this link, not on the potency of the agent itself. As a result, tobacco, alcohol, the sun and mustard gas are all bundled together as Group 1 carcinogens — well-established culprits.

World’s least popular agency?